The Wide Circumference of Love Read online

  “I had some issues that really had nothing to do with him.”

  “Sister, we all got issues.”

  “Tell me something, just between you and me, that I should know about him.”

  “He’s hungry. Hungrier than me. Like that building we’re doing. That’s a big deal. A big fuckin’ deal for us. In four years this is our biggest contract. Normally it would have gone to a white firm, although our design was solid and our bid low, that’s just the way it has been. But Gregory’s got something to prove. He’s the youngest son, chose a profession you got to study and intern for almost as long as to be a doctor and without the guarantee of a steady clientele. Medicine’s the family business. He wants to prove he made the right choice.”

  “What’s he told you about me?”

  “Damn, you’re shameless,” Mercer said, reaching for his beer. “That you’re a beautiful woman of substance. But you don’t believe that do you?”

  “Is it so obvious?”

  “Only to someone really looking closely. But he’s right, and you’ve got the brother, long as he’s what you want. And if he don’t treat you right, my foot goes up his ass.”

  “Whose foot goes up whose ass?” Gregory asked as he rejoined them.

  “I was just telling Diane here that I got her back.”

  “She’ll be well taken care of.”

  “I just told her I’m gonna see to that.”

  “My goodness, young lady, you are quite … tall,” Margaret Tate observed when she met Diane. Tall, that was the word, innocuous and harmless. But Margaret Tate, a slender woman with an olive complexion and dressed that day in tailored slacks and a white silk blouse, looked at Diane with a pinched smile that merely enhanced the disdain Diane was certain she saw settled in her eyes. She had said “tall,” yet “orphaned, damaged, dark,” was what Diane heard.

  “Mother, this is Diane, the woman who has stolen my heart,” Gregory said after Margaret had opened the front door and hugged Gregory as though she had not seen him in years (he’d told Diane he visited his mother and father every Sunday). Margaret then turned regretfully away from her son to look at Diane, who felt herself looming in the vestibule, waiting her turn, for what she was not sure. After the comment about her height, Margaret consumed every aspect of Diane with a practiced, glacial glance. In a few seconds, Margaret’s eyes studied Diane’s natural hair, her large hoop earrings, and her face, then receded.

  The living room resembled a stage set, open and sunny with a profusion of plants and fresh-cut flowers in the windowsills and on settee tables. The sofas and chairs were overstuffed, startlingly white with deep brown cloths draping the cushions for contrast. The room felt open and closed at the same time as Diane sat in one of those white chairs and watched Gregory sit beside his mother on the sofa. Gregory had told Diane that Margaret and Ramsey Tate had hosted fund-raisers for Walter E. Washington, the city’s first presidentially appointed black mayor, and for Marion Barry, the first elected mayor. Probably in this room, Diane thought, hearing in her mind glasses tinkling and the buzz of animated conversation.

  “Help yourself,” Margaret told Diane, pointing to the coffee table burdened with a full silver tea set, crystal teacups, and an array of small sandwiches cut in triangles.

  “Thank you,” Diane whispered, reaching for a teacup as Margaret filled it, suddenly uncomfortably aware of how tall she was.

  “Where’s Dad?” Gregory asked.

  “Napping on the sun porch. Go wake him. He’s been sleeping since noon, and he should come and meet your friend.”

  Watching Diane sip her tea, Margaret placed her hands on her thighs, leaned forward slightly, and said, “Gregory tells me you’re a lawyer.” Diane now noticed the layer of pancake makeup and the rouge flowering on Margaret’s cheeks.

  “Yes, yes,” she stuttered.

  “And you’re from Washington originally?”

  “Yes, southeast, Congress Heights.”

  “And your parents?”

  “My mother was a nurse at Howard Hospital back in the days when it was Freedman’s.”

  “Was?”

  “She died when I was a child.”

  “I’m sorry. I know that must have been difficult for you. My husband was once head of surgery there. I wonder if he knew your mother.”

  To that suggestion Diane said nothing, she merely reached for a sandwich for which she had no appetite. She imagined if her mother had known Ramsey Tate, if he might have been one of the many “uncles” she brought home. The thought made her place both the sandwich and the cup of tea on the coffee table in order to steady her nerves.

  “And your father?”

  “He and my mother divorced when I was very young and I never got to know him.”

  “You poor dear,” Margaret said, her face creased with what seemed to be genuine concern. “That makes all that you’ve achieved that much more significant, considering where you came from. Come here sit beside me,” she offered expansively, scooting over on the sofa to make room for Diane, who sat reeling from the sting of Margaret’s condescending conclusion. She could hear Gregory talking to his father, and she wished she could telekinetically transport the two men into the living room.

  Margaret coaxed out of Diane the story of her journey to Spelman and law school. Sipping her tea, Margaret nodded in approval.

  “Come, come closer,” Margaret urged her as she reached for a photo album on the side table. “I want to show you some pictures.”

  The leather-bound album was a cavalcade of the history of Margaret and Ramsey Tate’s families: An ebony-hued dark-skinned drummer boy who looked no more than twelve or thirteen, dressed in a Union army uniform and white gloves. One of Margaret’s aunts wearing a high-necked dress of brocade and lace. She was president of the local chapter of the National Negro Women’s Club organization. A photo of Ramsey Tate examining a little girl in a clinic in Greenwood, Mississippi. Margaret and Ramsey on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard.

  “Family is so important, and we’re very proud of ours,” Margaret said gently closing the album. “There are other pictures in that album I didn’t show you. Pictures of my uncle who was lynched in Memphis because he owned some land and a grocery store and refused the money a white man offered him to buy it, pennies on the dollar for what the store and the land was worth.”

  The bitterness in Margaret’s voice as she revealed this chipped away at the glazed veneer of welcome Diane had felt rising between them. If this was what sufficed for warmth, Diane decided, she would take it. Without warning, she found herself admiring this titanically self-possessed woman.

  “So you’re a lawyer. That’s a good start. Where do you want to ultimately land?

  “Land?”

  “Yes, what have you set your sights on? A judgeship?”

  Diane was satisfied with where she was but felt to say that to Margaret Tate would reveal an unforgivable defect. “Well, I have time.”

  “Do you? Are you sure?” Margaret shook her head in dismay. “That’s the thing about whites. They never sleep, they’re never satisfied.”

  “Mother, are you harassing my girlfriend?” Gregory asked as he wheeled his father into the room.

  “No, it’s just that I’m so impressed with her I could talk to her all day.”

  Over the weeks and months that followed Diane’s visit to Gregory’s parents, she and Margaret built a kind of détente. One question from Diane and Margaret would launch into interlaced memories of her role as coordinator for a fund-raiser at their church for the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council, her doctoral research on the political impact of black sororities, or the challenges and frustrations of chairing the department of sociology at Howard. Diane felt somehow anointed when, as the two women cooked dinner together for the regular Tate gatherings, Margaret would say as a way of learning about Diane’s work, “I read about the most awful case in the Post this week. Are you working on that?”

  Over t
he required second-Sunday dinners that brought Gregory’s brothers, Bruce and David, to the house—Bruce with his wife and son, David with a procession of attractive girlfriends—Diane was slowly inducted into the Tate clan.

  Ramsey Tate, at seventy-five, was twenty years older than Margaret. The vigorous, influential head of surgery at his hospital had, to everyone’s surprise, begun showing signs of dementia several years earlier that eventually forced him to resign. Two years later, he suffered a stroke that left him, despite rehabilitation, wheelchair-bound with only partial speech.

  Over those Sunday dinners, Gregory’s father sat amongst his family, despite the twin challenges of dementia and the stroke, his eyes glazed with brightness, holding up his left hand when he wanted to speak, his voice hoarse and cracked and nearly unintelligible but still stubbornly vibrant as he weighed in on family gossip and discussions of politics. Diane watched as his wife and sons listened with patience and what seemed like gratitude to his halting, treasured words. She watched Gregory help Margaret place Ramsey in the lift chair that took him upstairs. She saw Margaret read him articles from Ebony and Jet, whole chapters from murder mysteries.

  This was what families did, Diane thought. They cared for one another, loved even more fiercely the weakest among them.

  Diane helped Gregory care for his father, laying out clothing for him as Gregory helped him bathe, sitting on the sun porch beside him when Gregory helped Margaret with errands, touched to the core when Ramsey Tate squeezed her hand and struggled to mouth and utter the word, “Daughter.”

  By Christmas, she and Gregory had begun talking about marriage as the assumed next step. Marriage would give her a whole new history; no one except Gregory need ever know how loss and abandonment had stained her. She had not been raised to walk the tightrope stretched across the terrain of Gregory’s world and she shivered at the thought, wondered if she would fit in with grace and comfort. Her past told her she did not belong here but her heart told her she had come home.

  They married a year to the day after the August night they met and Diane became a Tate, a member of a world that from afar had seemed ceremonial and self-absorbed. Dinners and dances, fund-raisers, galas, and more. In the summer, they’d spend two weeks in Oak Bluffs, a village on Martha’s Vineyard. There was the beach and the round of parties, the salons hosted by the island’s most celebrated black lawyer, doctor, or banker, or the next presumed black winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

  She felt like an imposter. On guard for any words or deeds that confirmed her belief that she was an interloper in this world. Vigilant for slights, hiding behind disdain to prevent any unexpected strike against her or the ghost of her parents who stood invisibly by her side.

  One night in the ladies’ room of the Hilton Hotel, where Margaret was being honored by her sorority, Diane had taken refuge from her table of twelve. Suddenly, Margaret opened the door and strode over to her daughter-in-law. Margaret’s gray floor-length gown hugged her curves and revealed a swath of her neckline and chest. A pearl choker clung to her neck and the matching earrings shone like surprised, tiny eyes. Neither woman spoke as they drifted over to the mirror.

  “You’re so sure we think we’re better than you, but you’ve already decided you’re better than us.”

  Before Diane could respond, Margaret forged ahead. “My son married you for a reason. He loves you. I’m glad he did. We have welcomed you into our family. But I feel your resistance to truly accepting us. Out there you see the final product. You don’t see how all that was made. The grandmothers who were domestics and saved to put somebody through Howard or Fisk. The fathers who were Pullman porters and on-call, all the time, but who grinned and bore it. And yes, we like to think we’ve made it. Because we have. But we know we’re black, and we hit the glass ceiling every day. My son loves you. We all want to love you. Let us. Get over it.”

  Diane stood, strangely relieved by Margaret’s injured soliloquy. It had slashed the skin of the barricade she had erected, that separated her from the world she had married into. That wall she knew, held off a famished longing and desire.

  She wanted to ask but could not, “What part, Margaret? What part do I get over first? The father I didn’t really know or the mother who was raped?” The whirlwind of Margaret’s words had left her with a throat parched and aching and her eyes wet with stifled tears.

  She wanted to tell her mother-in-law, “It’s less about who you all are than who I’m afraid I’ll always be.” Orphaned and alone, no matter the depth of Gregory’s love. That is what she tried to will herself to say. The words she mustered instead were plaintive, a stripped-down plea: “Just give me some time Margaret. Just give me some time.”

  Diane had brought it all into the marriage with her like some rancid dowry—her mother, her father, the grief sown into her fingerprints and her cells, and the fear that she would never be at ease in Gregory’s world. That she could never make his world hers. Clumsily, callously, Margaret had called her out. How long, Diane wondered, had Margaret been preparing that speech, waiting for what she deemed to be the opportune moment? Was her discomfort tonight so obvious? Why had Gregory said nothing? How could he have said anything? It had to be Margaret; she was the only one who could have said those words. Perhaps, the only one in the family who had the right.

  Margaret’s palm touched Diane’s cheek. “I didn’t want to offend you, but I had to say something.”

  Flushed with a brokenness that was unexpectedly healing, Diane said, “Let’s go back to the ballroom. There’s an extraordinary woman who’s about to be honored.”

  Diane and Margaret settled back at their table with Gregory, Ramsey, Bruce, David, and several of Margaret’s sorority sisters. When the program began again, Margaret was introduced and walked to the stage to accept her award for her work mentoring younger members of the sorority and for heading the organization’s community outreach programs. Margaret spoke of joining the sorority while an undergraduate at Howard.

  “All the things that have come to matter most to me happened to me on that campus,” Margaret said, clutching the crystal statuette. “I met my husband who gave me love and a family. And I joined this organization and found a sisterhood that ensures I will never, ever be alone.”

  Margaret gracefully wound her way back to her table through the ballroom full of women and men who had stood to give her an ovation, accepting the hugs and handshakes with a practiced generosity. When she reached her table, Diane was the first to stand, the first to reach out for her, the first to offer an embrace.

  Three days later, Ramsey Tate had a heart attack while napping one afternoon and died in his sleep.

  Diane joined Gregory and his brothers in handling the multitude of preparations for the memorial and funeral. Planning for the kind of “home-going” befitting the life of Ramsey Tate allowed them to sideline the act of grieving. The memorial service took place at the Tate family church, Metropolitan AME, and was standing room only as fellow doctors, former medical students, patients, friends, and the scores of people who knew Ramsey Tate from his work with professional, civic, and political groups honored his memory.

  That night, after she and Gregory returned to their home, to the house that Ramsey had made the down payment on, after a long day that had begun with the memorial, then was followed by the internment at Lincoln Cemetery, and a repast at Margaret’s house that lasted until nearly eight p.m., they went to their bedroom and wordlessly undressed. Beneath the sheets, they held on to each other, silenced by the arrival of the mourning that had been stalled and by the presence of death that had entered the house with them.

  “How was it for you when your mother died?” Gregory asked, releasing Diane and turning on his side to face her.

  “I was so young. It somehow wasn’t real to me. My aunt and uncle took my brother and me in and they felt the best thing was to go on. To not say much about what had happened. There was no one really that I could talk to about whatever I was feeling. I recall feeling dis
connected from what I knew would be emotions like nothing I had ever felt before. So I tried to erect a wall between those feelings and the rest of me. I got pretty good at that.”

  “Well, this is real. And I feel it. The grief but not the sadness. My father was such a presence in my life, in all our lives. During Freedom Summer in 1964, he took me and Bruce and David to Mississippi with him to provide medical treatment for sharecroppers. He let me watch him perform an operation one time. He told me that he wished I’d become a doctor but that he envied the adventure I’d have as an architect.”

  “I wish I’d known him before. So we could have talked. Really talked.”

  “Y’know, in his spare time before he got really sick, he wrote poetry. He was no Langston Hughes, but reading it gave me another way to know who he was.”

  Her husband had lost his father and because of who his father had been, what his father had evoked and inspired in them all, Diane knew this moment would open and seal them, bound and bond them.

  She kissed Gregory and told him, “Maybe this is the best moment, the only moment to tell you this. I’m going to have a baby.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Gregory said, holding Diane close, kissing her face, cheeks, lips in an unabashed display of pleasure. “He would’ve been so happy.”

  “We’ll tell our child all about their grandfather.”

  “Who knows, maybe he’ll meet your mother in heaven.”

  Diane laughed at the thought, so generous, brimming with a sincere innocence that made her want to love Gregory forever.

  Chapter Eight

  1980

  Now that she was pregnant, Diane hungered for her paternal family. She was ready and willing to try to find her father. The day Georgia told her that Ella was raped, she had pressed into Diane’s hand a phone number of another aunt, her father’s sister.